Detection of multiple change points in a Weibull accelerated failure time model using sequential testing

Abstract

With improvements to cancer diagnoses and treatments, incidences and mortality rates have changed. However, the most commonly used analysis methods do not account for such distributional changes. In survival analysis, change point problems can concern a shift in a distribution for a set of time‐ordered observations, potentially under censoring or truncation. We propose a sequential testing approach for detecting multiple change points in the Weibull accelerated failure time model, since this is sufficiently flexible to accommodate increasing, decreasing, or constant hazard rates and is also the only continuous distribution for which the accelerated failure time model can be reparameterized as a proportional hazards model. Our sequential testing procedure does not require the number of change points to be known; this information is instead inferred from the data. We conduct a simulation study to show that the method accurately detects change points and estimates the model. The numerical results along with real data applications demonstrate that our proposed method can detect change points in the hazard rate.